


First I think I lost myself

by ThatOnePlatypus



Series: Deep space and distant stars [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Space AU, Uzushiogakure | Hidden Eddy Village
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 06:09:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17913269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatOnePlatypus/pseuds/ThatOnePlatypus
Summary: Rin sees her fall, as do many others with their eyes to the sky. It’s impossible to miss her, a human shaped body with hair like a red shooting star’s tail.





	First I think I lost myself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mutemelody](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutemelody/gifts).



> Here. Have some faulty astronomy with Naruto! Aka, the first part in a long series of part in a space au.  
> Other parts will be posted, so don't hesitate to subscribe to the series!  
> I haven't reread myself, and it's two am, so if you see typos or something easily fixed, tell me and I'll edit tomorrow! Cheers!
> 
> Title is from the song Ruins, from my First Aid Kit.
> 
> Enjoy!

Rin sees her fall, as do many others with their eyes to the sky. It’s impossible to miss her, a human shaped body with hair like a red shooting star’s tail.

She comes through one of the many whirlpools of black and nothing, disappears through another, and comes through again. Falling, falling, falling towards them, an arm extended towards the void as if to try and reach it.

“Someone catch her!” Someone shouts, and perhaps it’s Rin herself who does, and perhaps it’s all of them.

As one, they clamber up the floating paths, and the seal-bridges, jumping through the asteroids that make their home towards the falling woman. Rin is among them, for all that she’s not Uzumaki and probably doesn’t know this woman who has the clan’s hair. It’s been a year only, though, since she fell here herself, spat out of the starless void, and Rin cannot help but think _she’s like me, she’s falling like me_.

In the end, no one catches her.

The star of a woman’s course ends in one of the many bubbles of water floating around, and for a single instant, all is still.

Then Kushina breaks out of the surface with a wild look on her face, and a terrible cry on her lips.

“ _Minato! Naruto!_ ” She calls, trying desperately to fall out of the bubble, to reach up up up from where she came.

Rin’s heart breaks and reforms, in a single beat full of disbelief and hope.

“Kushina!” She calls, and doesn’t care for anything except for her teacher’s wife, the older sister figure she loved so much and thought she’d never see again despite being surrounded by her family.

Kushina startles, swimming around to face her, and her eyes widen at her sight. Rin smiles at her, wide and relieved, and offers her hand to drag her out of the water, and onto a safer piece of ruin that is much more steady.

Kushina falls onto the rock with her, and it’s only then that Rin realizes that the red on her is not only hair, but blood as well, staining her legs and abdomen.

“Kushina, hold on!” Rin calls, hands immediately glowing green. Her cheeks grow hot with her medical implants, even as she pushes her hands against skin to find the injury. “Please hold on!”

 _Don’t die,_ she means, because she couldn’t bear to lose Kushina again.

Kushina struggles, but doesn’t push her hands from her. Just shifts to look up, to the void through which she fell. Rin doesn’t look, can’t look with her focus on healing the injury – internal damage, to an extent that suggests something terrible happened. Something _ripped_ through Kushina’s abdomen, and from the location-

“A child?” Rin breathes, even as she steadily knits back tissue and vessels, too slow, too slow.

“Naruto,” Kushina moans, her face pale, hazy eyes blurred with fever finding her own. “Rin- Rin, my son, my Naruto, is he here?”

Rin cannot reply, can only keep healing. If Kushina was still pregnant when she shot through space like a meteor, she doubts the baby survived the trip. Regardless, there is no baby here now.

“Rin, my Naruto,” Kushina insists, and grabs her hand tightly, “And Minato- Minato, he was with me-”

 _That_ makes Rin’s eyes snap up to the void, and then turn to the nearest Uzumaki. Most of them are watching, not suited to medical care. One, with deep magenta hair and bite scars over her skin is closer, just in case she is needed, but Rin would prefer not to ask this of her.

“Did someone else fall?” Rin asks, and as one the Uzumaki turn to the sky, some of them scattering and climbing up to try and see if another body is coming.

It’s only because they all are watching that they see it. A flash of yellow, bright like the sun, for a single heartbeat, shooting through space just like Kushina did.

And then, the largest black hole that takes up the sky above them claims him, devouring him into nothingness.

Rin’s heart cries and aches, her eyes wide.

She turns back to Kushina.

“We found Minato,” she tells her, and doesn’t tell her that he won’t fall here with them.

“Oh,” Kushina says, her face slacking with relief. “Good. Good. I’m glad.”

She relaxes more, eyes fluttering shut, but Rin doesn’t worry. She knows her own capacity, knows that Kushina will survive. She’s just unconscious.

The woman nearest to her turns a heavy gaze on Rin.

“He fell into the Shinigami’s Stomach,” she tells her, as if Rin hadn’t seen it as well as she did.

Rin nods tersely, hands never faltering.

Yes, he did. And unless he had protections while he did, he’s probably dead by now. But Rin clings to Kushina’s life, and for that, she clings to her hopes as well.

“Minato-sensei,” she says, “Is a seal master, and Kushina’s husband. He may still live.”

Rin hopes, desperately, that he still lives.

 

 

 

Uzushio has changed, since she last was there. Kushina supposes it’s only natural – Kiri threw their biggest whale ships at them, and Iwa iced the cake with a few hundred of bombers. Uzushio as it was, the big blue planet with several moons, all linked together with advanced seal bridges, is no more, blown to pieces.

Now Uzushio is built from the ruins of an empire, nested in the field of asteroids that used to be Kushina’s home planet.

It’s still home, though, for all that it’s not the same. The people remain, as do their knowledge. The water that used to flow under foot in the capital city is still there, now, floating in pools and bubbles, seals keeping it together like it does the air they all breathe.

Uzushio was built to withstand the same black holes that protect them. Kushina’s clan had found a way to move a planet and its moons in the deadliest corner of the galaxy. They earned their name, Uzumaki, by laughing at the same thing everyone else fears, and making it home.

If the many black holes that whirl in the sky all around Uzushio never killed the Uzumaki, nor destroyed their home fully, then what could a few space fleets do?

Nothing. They destroyed many things, destroyed the planet, but in the end, all that matters remains.

The paved way that Kushina follows is nothing but glowing seals keeping rocks floating together, but the building she’s headed to hasn’t been rebuilt at all. There was no need for it.

Of all that Uzushio’s capital city contained, a few buildings and pieces are left. Asteroids, and islands, floating around and bridged together with ropes and seal chains and the very science Kushina’s people always breathed. The palace is now the central piece of their reconstructed colony, white and gold stone still rooted deep onto the biggest asteroid of them all.

The tree that Hashirama gifted Uzushio with, when he married their princess, is still there too, green and vibrant, alive and uncaring for the few scars that the explosion of the planet left in its bark. It expands high over the palace, protecting everything under it and bringing air without seals.

Uzushio may be bits and pieces, but it endured.

“Kushina-san,” one of her many, long forgotten cousins greets her as she passes by, smiling.

Kushina nods back, smiles as well. Uzushio endured, and so did her clan. It’s ironic, in a way, that when she fell she lost a family, only to find another, old one instead.

Maybe it’s selfish of her, but Kushina still wishes she didn’t. Her stomach is fully healed, as are her organs, and her brain – everything that tore when she was thrown through the sky. But it still aches, most of the time, phantom pain.

Most of all, she misses her baby, the boy she barely glimpsed before it was taken from her, and her husband.

It doesn’t take Kushina very long to find the one she’s looking for. Rin, predictably, is in the library, hanging from one of the many shelves that survived Uzushio’s destruction. It’s funny to Kushina, how her clan didn’t bother to protect the _building_ that housed the shelves, just the shelves themselves and the things they contained.

Now, they do not have a proper library. Just shelves, floating in one of the most secure seal-domes that her clan could make, uncaring of gravity.

“Rin-chan!” Kushina calls, as she enters the dome, and is rewarded to see the girl startle off the shelf.

With a yelp, Rin catches herself, and lands lightly on one of the pavements that are used as stairs. Jumping off them, she lands in front of Kushina in a few seconds, pouting at her even as she puts the book she was reading at her belt.

“Kushina-san,” Rin huffs, “You startled me!”

“I’m very sorry,” Kushina lies brightly, “But I was too excited to see you!”

Rin’s face softens, and she laughs when Kushina grabs her arm and tries to steer her towards the exit.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Rin laughs. “ _Someone_ is happy to be discharged from the hospital!”

“You know it!” Kushina exclaims, the moment they are out of the dome. “I was so bored! I’m fine! And I wanted to explore!” She turns to the girl, and smiles. “You must know all the best places!”

“Well, I don’t know about _best_ , but I know enough,” Rin agrees. “Come on.”

They walk on, towards the Eastern side of the colony. It’s so different from Konoha, despite being built as freely as Kushina’s other home. Konoha is trees twisting and bridging planets and moon together around the sun, pockets of air and buildings made of wood, shuttles constantly navigating around.

Uzushio, though, is glowing bridges of seals and asteroids, black voids and bits of ruins, stone arches and organized chaos constantly stirred slowly on itself, floating aimlessly.

“It must be weird for you,” Kushina suddenly realizes, looking at Rin. “I grew up here, or well, on Uzushio as it was, but still. You didn’t.”

“It is, a little,” Rin agrees. “But, I like it here. I won’t mind staying, I think.”

“You don’t have to,” Kushina tells her. “Once we get Minato back, we can go back to Konoha.”

Rin smiles at her, sad, and doesn’t answer. Kushina knows that look, and can’t speak.

There’s a new black hole in the sky, that they say came from nowhere and spat out a girl with a hole in her chest. Black holes don’t just come out of nowhere, and yet this one did. Kushina has never seen it before, for all that she used to know Uzushio’s sky like the palm of her own hand.

Rin is the one that named it. Isobu.

Kushina wonders if Rin can hear it speak, but she doesn’t dare ask. It’s better if she doesn’t know.

Still, she wonders, because she has never met someone like her before.

She wonders if the feeling for Rin is similar to the connection she used to share with Kurama. Something that felt both natural and invasive, easy as breathing and yet sometimes the heaviest burden ever put on her shoulders.

Kushina both misses that connection, the companionship and the brightness, and doesn’t. The constant fire and rage simmering behind her eyelids is gone, and she likes the peace it brings her.

It still leaves a small part of her empty, though.

Just as the absence of her family does.

“Do you think they’ll find Minato-sensei?” Rin suddenly asks.

“I hope so,” Kushina says, raising her head to gaze at the sky.

Far, far above them, the biggest black hole that shields Uzushio whirls lazily, so black it absorbs all the light around it. Its name, the Shinigami’s Stomach, is fitting – once upon a time, there were several solar systems there, eaten into a black whirlpool of nothing.

Kushina didn’t see, when she fell through the stars and space, where Minato went. But others did.

They saw her crashing in Uzushio’s ruins. And they saw Minato, a flash of bright yellow, get swallowed by the black hole.

If it were any other clan, any other place than Uzushio, Kushina would mourn. But the Uzumaki put Uzushio here, because they do not fear the black holes. They have protections, and even further than that, they have ways to naviguate them.

If Minato is in the Shinigami’s Stomach, if he’s alive there… Then they’ll find him, and they’ll bring him back.

And then, they can find a way to go back to their son together.

Kushina believes that, with all her soul.


End file.
